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I'm posting this in this subforum because it felt like a more appropriate place than the Mechanics subforum, if only because Hyperspace isn't something I've seen mentioned by the devs. We know from NQ that (borrowing an old quote Saffi's thread here https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/304-scrub-stargate-and-transportation-questions/): - FTL Travel will be the hard and slow way to explore other solar systems. It will be difficult because complex logistics will be needed to make the travel worth it. In fact, we expect FTL Travel to be most likely used to go to an adjacent unexplored solar system, and build a Stargate. Based on that summary of what we know so far, I'd like to discuss idea of Hyperspace travel between Stargates. One can presume, based on that summary, that the expected outcome of using a Stargate would be instantaneous travel between two locations in space. However instead of an instant warp between two locations, I think it would be more intriguing if Stargates operated more as interstellar highways where travel between two points was faster than simply using FTL but still not instantaneous. Similar to how it took several minutes for the crew to travel through the wormhole in Interstellar: The ingame reasoning for this could be that there is simply not a way to completely bend space to have two points touch each other, that space could only be bent so far. Or that there is just not way to produce that much negative energy. I think this can be best illustrated with this diagram of a wormhole: Wherein point A and B do not explicitly touch each other, but there is a "throat" distance between the two points. This "throat" could be described as "hyperspace". I'm imagining the hyperspace gates from Cowboy Bebop, specifically from the "Gateway Shuffle" episode. Where entering a gate would put you on a narrow fast lane through space, but leaving that fast lane safely and accurately (explained below) requires the existence of an exit gate. Flying through hyperspace wouldn't make you immune to attack, and you would have to navigate carefully through the path, as leaving it could cause massive damage to your ship and leave you stranded in unexplored space, millions of lightyears from the nearest inhabited solar system. A journey through hyperspace between two gates would only be a few minutes, as opposed to the hours/days of travel with FTL. This clip from Star Trek Into Darkness visually illustrates what I think leaving hyperspace would look like, although I know they're not travelling in hyperspace in Star Trek but I don't want to get into the semantics of the Star Trek universe: That clip also brings up another detail that I'd like to see if this were implemented, combat while in hyperspace. I think that ships should still be able to fire on one another while in hyperspace. Although perhaps the mechanics of combat while in hyperspace should be modified to account for the different type of combat environment vs real space. ie, laser shots being bent because of the immense pull of gravity? Stargates would probably be incredibly difficult to destroy, so there wouldn't be a very big chance of getting stuck in hyperspace because of a group of pirates shooting at your exit gate. But they shouldn't be impossible destroy, so that a sufficiently large fleet could take one on. There could also be a mechanic that allows for different sized stargates, or stargates that prohibit specific ship types or sizes from passing through. The diameter of a stargate could also determine the size of its hyperspace lane. I have more to say about the topic of stargates, but I'd like to see what others think about this first.
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I just wanted to touch on the combat mechanics of larger ships. I've played ALL of the space sim/building games available and I dislike how they all work. I have been playing a game called Dreadnought recently and this is the ship combat style I'd like to see in games like this. Unfortunately it's not an open world voxel building game. Currently in other ship building games you can really only place turrets that automatically track (and suck at it; empyrion). Yes you can also man the turret, but then you can't fly the ship. I'd rather have a free looking reticle and where you aim while you are flying is where your turrets will aim and shoot, flying would be wasd like if walking. Of course you would have to intelligently place turrets because the starboard side wouldn't be able to fire to the port side, and top/bottom etc. Then there would have to be two different flight models for fighter style and capital ship style...It's what I hope for, though.
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So I want sure if this was the best place, maybe it should be moved to the General Discussion thread, or possibly game mechanics. I decided to post a short story of a scenario I envision happening in game. I don't fully know all the mechanics that will be available but my story highlights some mechanics that I hope are available. It also sheds some light into how we operate and things we tend to implement when possible in games. Sorry that my writing sucks, I usually just focus on the story. It’s a barren world, covered in vast deserts and lakes. In a large lake on the North continent the water begins to stir. Slowly a rectangular chain wall begins to break the surface. It is a half a kilometer long and 200m wide. As the wall breaks the surface the water inside begins to rapidly drain away. As it does a large metal door is exposed and begins to slide away exposing a massive chamber. Slowly a Daedalus class BC, the Asteria, begins to rise from the chamber. It is over 400m long and covered in turrets, a bit unfinished but it was combat ready. As it emerges it slowly begins to ascend, thrusting lightly as to not damage anything below. As it clears the hangar the doors closing behind it and the walls recede allowing the water to rush back over. Once it is several hundred feet above and the water is covering the doors again I increase the thrusters to full. Angling upwards I quickly gain altitude and enter orbit. Once in orbit I set the nav point and activate FTL. It is just a short jump to a nearby asteroid belt in system. Once in FTL I activate the defensive AI and head to the hangar. The Asteria is a bit more than needed for a mining trip, but I like to take it out for whatever reason I can, besides it makes for a good guard while mining. The right hangar contains a smaller miner. Equipped with multiple laser miners and plenty of storage for the ore I mine. Once the Asteria drops out of FTL I look at the nav feed to see it is all clear, not many people are in the region so I never expect anyone. Occasionally our sensor drones pick up an explorer that comes through, and so far the neighbors that are nearby have not located our base. I send a command to open the bay door and start up Little Bite’s engines. Slowly I emerge from the hangar and begin thrusting to the Trillium asteroid 1km starboard. Slowing down on approach, I line up near a cavity in the surface. I had been here already and cleared away most of the rock around the Trillium core. I activated the miners and watch the surface of the asteroid as the matter dissolves away funneled into nanocells for storage. The power is a bit insufficient so I have to pulse the lasers, allowing the power cells to recharge. One of these days I will quit being lazy and fix that, but for now I watch as the Trillium begins to fill up my storage with a few traces of rare elements. I wonder how many more trips will be needed to finish our capital ship. Suddenly an alert pops up, one of our sensor arrays in orbit around the planet picked up something. A small vessel entering an FTL jump. It must have been a stealth ship observing the planet, shit. I quickly cut the lasers and thrust away from the asteroid. I align and burn towards the Asteria, coming in for a hard landing. As soon as I am in the hangar I send a command to close the hangar doors and begin charging the FTL as I dock Little Bite. Sprinting down the corridor I arrive at the bridge, there’s still a minute left to charge the FTL drive. I sit down and pull up the sensor logs as I wait, aligning the Asteria towards the planet. No sign of the stealth ship entering orbit, it must have traveled in and been there a while. Just as I am about to jump the sensors pick up 3 FTL signatures dropping in orbit around the planet. All quick moving destroyer class ships. I adjust my coordinates to their location and enter FTL. Just under a minute until I exit warp, all I can do is wait, all guns active. As I drop out of warp I am just 10km from the nearest destroyer. One of them is clearly a planetary bombardment design and is lining up to fire below, centered over our base. The stealth ship must have been there to determine our location. The planetary bombardment destroyer was already unloading its kinetic kill projectiles down onto the planet and the other two were firing missiles down as well. As soon as my targeting sensors had a lock I unleashed everything onto the PB destroyer, catching it by surprise and ripping through its rear shields, and penetrating deep into the hull. A lucky shot destabilized a reactor, causing an explosion that ripped the back end of the ship off crippling it. As the kinetic kill projectiles entered the atmosphere turrets on the surface were already coming to life. Pedestals were rising above the surface of the water with SAM and Flak turrets. The Kinetic kill weapons were hard to track and shoot down, but a few were broken up before impacting. The remainder were stopped mostly by the water, with no energy left by the time they hit the hangar door below. With over 2 dozen flak turrets almost all of the missiles from the first wave were taken out. But it was clear they knew the base location and were here to destroy it. On the Asteria I launched the 2 dozen fighters I had onboard and routed shield power forward. The remaining 2 destroyers quickly began turning their fire onto me. I began launching missile volleys but my laser capacitors were completely drained from the opening attack. Even without it my missiles are overpowering the shields slowly. As the fighters reached the ships they began circling it in tight orbits, not doing much damage with the shields up, but distracting the automated turrets and reducing fire on the Asteria. My shields were at 85% but slowly dropping as their missiles start leaking through my flak cannons. As my laser cannon reaches full charge I fire it just as a volley from my rail gun hits, collapsing the destroyers shields, but it remained largely intact. However the next volley began to destroy chunks out of the hull. It was quickly gutted by missiles and left crippled. About then, large explosions begin erupting on the surface below. Starting from the center and stretching out in a line nearly 3km long they begin spreading outwards to nearly a kilometer wide. The false bottom of the lake is being blown to pieces, allowing all the water above to rush in below as it does. The emergency evacuation protocol has been initiated, meaning help is on its way. As the dust and fog begin to settle there is a massive swarm of small drones released. Just small battle space drones, they allow sensor feeds of the area and also act as an overload for enemy sensors. Shortly after another loud eruption as the Radials booster engines fire, slowly lifting it clear of the opening. Upon discovery of the stealth ship, Drakyn Ral quickly began activating its systems and moving what he could from the base into the Radeal. Its hull not more than half finished, very little systems were in place and functional. It had minimal power, thrusters, shields, and FTL with very few turret placements mounted already. I wasn’t even sure if Kloydeb had gotten around to uploading the AI to them so they would function at all. And none of us were sure that it could even break orbit. It had a booster system attached as an emergency launch system, but it functioning was all theoretical. Before the Radeal could reach orbit 10 smaller 50m long frigates exited FTL in the battle space above it. They quickly targeted the remaining destroyer, and with their DPS added to mine, its shields vanished. It was quickly engulfed in missile explosions, shredding the hull. The drones were part of the emergency protocol, and when active they activated their FTL and jumped in from deep space above the solar system. The hangar below was gutted and scorched as the engines fired, but we never intended to use it again anyway. As it reached orbit the booster system was released and fell back to the ground. The ships frame stretched 2.5km long and 500m wide, at the widest constructed points thus far. With only the basic frame in place for most of it, it looked almost like a rectangular box with some buildings stacked on top towards the rear. The front end was one giant hangar, large enough to swallow the Asteria. The side hangars were only beginning to be built, with small juts sticking out from the main hull. As the Radeal broke orbit it released more battle space drones followed by another 4 dozen fighters that quickly began to disperse in the battle space. Hartomo and Kloydeb each emerge from the Radeals hangar in Raptor class cruisers. But it didn’t stick around, with its FTL charged it initiated a quick jump out of the battle space where it would charge its drives for its travel to the beta base. We stick around and ensure that the Radeal enters FTL before charging our own. The Raptors quickly charge theirs and follow as escorts, but with my capacitor banks tapped from the battle it takes even longer than usual for me to charge my drive. Just as I am about to jump into FTL, my sensors light up red. With all the battle space drones feeding sensor data I quickly get locks and accurate tracking data on over a dozen ships. There are 2 capital class ships, a carrier and dreadnaught, both more than twice my mass. 2 BS, 4 BC and an assortment of cruiser and frigate class ships. The battle space lights up with explosions as their AI begins targeting and taking out the fighters and drones in the battle space. Immediately 3 of the AI frigates vanish in explosions. Not intending to stick around, I rapidly hit the FTL as it charges to completion. Just then a massive shell strikes my nearly depleted shield, punching through and ripping a massive chunk out of my right hangar bay. What is left of Little Bite floats free into space. Thanks to redundant and dispersed systems most of my ship is functional, including the FTL drive. Before any interdiction nets could be activated I slip into FTL, clearing the battle space. Within a few minutes I exit FTL near the Radeal. It got away with minimal damage, mostly from the debris falling from above when the lakebed was blown. One of the shield emitters wasn’t fully functioning and let some debris through, impacting the hull. The Asteria’s damage was a bit more extensive, but no major systems were hit. Most of the hangar will have to be rebuilt, but there weren’t many components and systems that were destroyed. We waited around until everyone recharged their FTL drive for the first of several long jumps to the beta base. For the rest of the crew who weren’t able to respond quickly enough, they will get there a bit quicker, as out in the void here there aren’t many RNs that they can spawn at. With Alpha base destroyed, Beta base will likely be the closest.
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I'd like to see joints in the game that allow us to build things like AT-AT from Star Wars, mobile suits from Gundam, and mining rigs from Lost Planet to assist in all areas of the game, combat, mining, building, and anything else that people could find an application for.
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I think this is a very important game design issue that needs to be addressed and re-addressed. How to avoid the single strategy that more numbers = win. Now, there is nothing wrong with the zergling strategy - it should be as viable as the next and I don't think the game should prevent organisations from adopting it. The problem occurs when it becomes the onlycounter to itself. A game that has only one viable strategy is either broken or boring. The key is in providing variability and making combat complex enough that the difficulty in leading players into a battle becomes exponentially higher with larger and larger groups. Here are some specific features that I think would ensure that wars and battles remain dynamic. Each topic could probably have an entire thread to itself so I'll try to be brief. Friendly Fire If you accidentally shoot your guildmate, he is shot and takes no less damage than an enemy would have. Ideally, this would be implemented by making projectiles, missiles, lasers, etc actually have to travel to their target, and if they hit something else on the way, then so be it. Manual Targetting If weapons have some kind of auto-targetting feature, it should be sub-optimal and unreliable. If there is some way for weapon designers to increase auto-targetting effectiveness it should come at a large cost of compromising with damage, range, mass, etc. Bigger Means More Complex There should be nothing from stopping players building a massive mothership with thousands of players and dozens of capabilities, but piloting and maintaining such a ship should be extremely difficult, and the ship itself should have weaknesses and be very far from invulnerable. Terrain This is less of an issue on planets as there will always be hills, forests, mountains, rivers, etc, etc that make natural choke points and affect what kind of tactics will be most effective. In space it is less obvious, but equally doable. Have vast regions of space encompassing multiple star systems that are saturated by nebulae. Include dense asteroid clusters, regions of space that are more rocky, planets with immense rings. There could also be regions affected by strong gravitational fields caused by black holes or neutron stars, and many other possibilities, and they could all be intertwined and overlapping. Each of these features would have some effect on travel and/or weaponry and defences just like "normal" geographical features do. Terrain on the battlefield and on the meta-scale creates opportunities for inventive leaders to shine and take a larger force by surprise. Resource Distribution My thought on this is to avoid static, infinite, and clustered sets of resources, particularly high-end resources. If there is a portion of the map that contains a lot of one particular type of resource then this will encourage "turtling" and make the acquisition of more players unto a single organisation easier. At the same time, a perfectly even distribution means trade between regions is less profitable, perhaps even not required, so this is a tough topic. One option is to have resources be finite at their given sources, but to have sources re-spawn elsewhere in the universe keeping the meta-game dynamic and ever changing. Arms Diversity and Rock/Paper/Scissors/Lizard/Spock Something that DU already has going for it is that all ships will be designed by individual players/organisations so we should expect a lot of diversity. However, there are bound to be certain a types of weapon and defences that can be mounted. I like GalCiv's system of having weapon types lasers/missiles/projectiles and their corresponding defences shields/point defence/armour. In addition to that, adding in mines, mine sweepers, cloaking devices, stealth detection, more and less effective propulsion systems, hangars for carrier capability, and Death Star type weaponry are all elements which can be included, each with their own advantages and drawbacks not just on the battlefield but in including them in a given ship design. And that's before mentioning ground weaponry (although I'm sure there will be a lot of overlapping) and the possibility of space-ground/ground-space interaction in battles. This kind of diversity provides more opportunities for inventive leaders to do something special against a superior force. Now, with these elements I believe it becomes much more difficult to adopt a zerg strategy. A massive army/fleet necessarily requires a practical chain of command, training drills, and disciplined soldiers who have been briefed by competent commanders who have a plan and can think on their feet. The more players in the fleet, the more difficult management of it becomes and large numbers of inexperienced and undisciplined soldiers will be a liability. Knowing and understanding the terrain gives a kind of "home advantage" for smart generals, and appropriate use of a variety of different kinds of ships/weapons, or having intelligence on the enemy's new ship designs could be put to devastating use. A quick note: we tend to think of a blob as lots of little ships, but in DU a blob could be a single super-massive ship with hundreds or thousands of players on board. In this thread when I say "zerglings" I mean massive numbers of players, but not necessarily massive numbers of ships.
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Hacking the system of a ship or building could be another component in combat. Say during space combat that you hijack the opponent ship's shield system, rendering them completely vulnerable, but that the same could also happen to you. It could either become a powerful asset or pitfall and add to the realistic aspects of the game, as cybersecurity and cybercrime are a very real problem in our world today. The question would be the format in which the hacking would take place. Would it be in an actual programming language (possibly LUA?), or in a fictional, simplified code, or perhaps it would be unique to that particular system.